Speaking of Obama, he recently co-led a bipartisan effort to make government spending more transparent by founding USA Spending.Gov. The massive website allows anyone easy access to all federal spending records with unprecedented openness & detail.It allows me to discover, for example, that in my Ohio district (#13) the single largest contract in 2007 was from the Department of Veterans Affairs for $56.2M awarded — after open competition and 4 competing bids — to Microtechnologies LLC to perform “automatic data processing and telecom services.” I also learned that the Department of the Interior paid Envirocom Construction $455k to replace an aqueduct and that General Services Administration paid Jeter Systems a nice $243k for furniture.

Nationally, the Lockheed Martin Corporation scored biggest in 2007, snagging $24.5 billion, or 7.6% of the federal budget. Those bastards at KBR Inc. weaseled their way into a mere $3.9B.

It was also interesting to compare states — noting, for example, that Virginia has 2.6% of the US population but gets 9.8% of all federal money; not surprisingly, Maryland (home to Lockheed Martin) & D.C. (home to Matt Shiraki) also fare well. New York is the biggest loser, home to 6.4% of Americans but only getting 2.6% of the payout pie; Illinois and Michigan follow behind NY.